Nanette Salomon 'The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission'

"The art historical canon is the most Virulent" p222. Salomon begins her assessment of the standard 'college text' by studying the work of Vasari and his 'Lives of the Artists'. She criticises his omission of women from his canon, and how he "invented the myth of the artist, and builds him as a constructed genius". p223 She points out how the art historian (Vasari) has created himself through the creation of the artist and through this he has the "licence and authority to proclaim what has quality and is valuable.

She looks at how the artist is the product of a patriarchal perpetual reinvention. Meaning that traditionally artist became artists because there fathers were, father/son. On the rare occasion that a woman entered the profession, it was because there was no one else to follow in the footsteps of the father. Women artists were not classed as geniuses, but rather 'exceptions', maintaining the myth of the artist. She quotes Janson, the contemporary Janson, who when asked why his text did not include any women artists replied: "no woman artist had been important enough to go into a one volume history of art." p225

Vasari and Janson maintain there canon through the consistency of a standard or norm. The function of this norm, she points out, is to create and maintain a hierarchy of insiders and outsiders. Their standard is judge by how close the artist comes to accepting classicism as the paradigm.

She analyses the traditinal use of the male nude and through this she critiques the conception of the female nude as being a site of male bonding and homoeroticism. "There is a historical relationship between the homoeroticism and artistic production of the idealized male nude." p231 The production of the female nude is the result of the oppression and stigma of public homosexuality. "Historically the two forms were created within the framework of creating two male desires, the homosexual and the hheterosexual"

Her juncture, as with most feminist scholars is through analysis of the existing Canon that it is not enough to insert the lost names back into the history books, because it does not challenge the traditional prejudiced tropes. She continues to argue that the hisotry offered by Vasari and Janson does not offer ways of analysis of the nude and art. "Vasari's invention of the artist, the critic, and the canon is tied to the economic and social conditions of his moment in history. While these conditions have changed, the deeper stratifications of gender race and class continue to operate within the culturally expressed power relationships that he articulated."

Griselda Pollock, 'Feminist Interventions in Arts Histories'

The formation of the feminist intervention negates the formal school of phallocentric masculinism and addressing the cultural, social, and political circumstances of production. Breaking down the subject into an analytical abstraction of causal concepts and analysing and reforming those parts and returning to the subject again. Challenges the notion of the woman/female as an object of male gaze and asserting them as subject. We cannot re-write women ( slot them into) the current history for that only reasserts the masculine history that ezxcluded them in the first place, and thus excluding them further. It is necessary to reassess the current faculty of binary history.

Taken from Vision and Difference, 1998, (Routledge Classics 2003) England

Linda Nochlin: 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'

In her case study of two artists, Linda Nochlin suggests that it is not prsonal circumstances that are directly responsible for the exclusion of women from the art scene, but rather it is the social and institutional errors which have made it impossible for female paricipation.

"The current uncritical acceptance of "what is" as "naturally" may be intellectually fatal. Just as Mill* saw male domination as one of many social injustices that had to be overcome if a truly just social order were to be created, so we may see the unconcious domination of white male subjectivity as one of many intellectual distortions." p1 Nochlin
*John Stuart Mill, 'The Subjection of Women' (1869)

Her argument is centered around the dominance of the 'white male'. She discusses the restrictions that were implaced which directly excluded women from the right and freedom of an accademic art education. Until recently women were restricted from being present at nude life studies, or to model for them, and mastering this technique was considered the height of artistic achievment. Another deprivation was the exclusion of women form art academies: "To be deprived of this major state of training meant to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art...none had attended that major stepping stone to artistic success, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts..." pp 25-26 Nochlin

She discusses the path into an artistic career. According to Nochlin, women only came into art through the encouragement of a male counterpart:

"Almost all women artists were either the daughters of artist fathers, or later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had close personal connections with a strong or dominant male artist." 30 Nochlin

This is partly to blame for the dismissal of women artists. When considered as part of this 'relationship' they will always be considered as a minority to the patriarchal figure of the male 'genius', this raises the interesting question of artists who came from non artistic backgrounds, and wether the influence is benign.

Nochlin approaches the notion of the male artist as a genius' figure, and that this is a critical invention, an idea which Nanette Salomon attributes to the 16th Century art critic Georgio Vasari. ['The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission'(1998)]